Trump, Pershing, Pigs’ Blood, And Egregious Hypocrisy

Donald Trump does and says so many egregious and outrageous things every, single day that sometimes it’s quite literally impossible for one person to catalogue and critique them all.

Well on Thursday, as news outlets began to work out the details around the terror attack in Barcelona, Trump tweeted this:

He’s told the Pershing story before. Here’s what he said at a rally last year:

The General caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood – you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem.

And guess what? It’s a lie. It didn’t happen. 

Here’s Texas A&M history professor and author of “Guardians of Empire,” a book about the U.S. military presence in Asia from 1902 to 1940, Brian Linn:

There is absolutely no evidence this occurred.

It’s a made-up story. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times people say this isn’t true. No one can say where or when this occurred.

Oh, and why don’t you ask James Arnold, the author of “Moro War: How America Battled a Muslim Insurgency in the Philippine Jungle, 1902-1913.” Here’s what he says:

This is a repeated myth that has no basis in truth.

Got that? It’s bullshit. Plain and simple.

Trump peddling bullshit isn’t new. Indeed, Trump peddling that particular bit of historical bullshit isn’t even new.

What makes the above tweet so interesting (and so absurd) is that this is a man who on Tuesday claimed that the reason it took him 48 hours to denounce neo-Nazis and the KKK was because he was waiting on the “facts.”

And yet on Thursday, without waiting on the “facts” about Barcelona, the President of the United States implicitly suggested that we should dip bullets in pigs’ blood and use them to execute Muslims suspected of terrorism. I challenge anyone to come up with a different interpretation of that tweet.

Now that would be bad enough on its own, but the juxtaposition with how he handled Charlottesville is telling: it took Trump two days to begrudgingly condemn neo-Nazis for an incident that saw a professed white nationalist mow down an American with a Dodge Challenger, but it took him just minutes to not only condemn, but actually call for the execution of, the perpetrator in Spain who committed the exact same crime. 

Additionally, he had no trouble calling the incident in Spain terrorism and yet he couldn’t bring himself to call Heather Heyer’s death an act of terror.

So in short, when he suspects a Muslim has killed innocent people, it’s immediately “terrorism” and the guilty party should be executed with a bullet dipped in pigs’ blood.

But when it’s a white nationalist who kills innocent people, maybe the whole thing was just one big misunderstanding instigated by Leftists who “didn’t have a permit.”

Got it.

********